BB's Random Stuff

March 24, 2005

My new DV camera

Shortly before leaving for a month to Sydney and Thailand, I splashed out on a nice new toy - a JVC GR-DX317 digital camcorder. I've never owned a camcorder before, so it would be a great new thing to start playing with.

I've only ever owned regular still cameras. These go with me pretty much anywhere I travel, and I've got thousands of digital photos from my camera. However I've been wanting a way to get more of a record of the travels. Still cameras can give great results and memories from travels, but there's something extra about having videos to go with photos. So I finally splashed
out on one of these at the local computer mega store - it was on special and
the others I looked at were sold out. Flying out in only 3 days kinda made me
not willing to wait.

However I'm glad that I got this one. It's a lovely camera, and it's very small,
making it easy enough to carry with me without being too much of a burden. Despite its small size, it's got a large LCD screen, and gives very impressive video quality. It's got a respectable zoom on it, extra wide angle mode, and
nice image stabilisation - using a long zoom shows rock solid stability, even with a noticeably shaky hand. It does make panning during zoom a little jerky, but turning off the stabilisation smooths things out.

On the accessory side, it comes with a remote control, which can be used during both recording and playback - watching videos via the tv output is made a lot more convenient. The battery it comes with it a bit small - I can get about 1 hour of constant use out of it. But spare high capacity batteries can be had fairly cheaply - a non-JVC replacment cost me about €10 on ebay (not yet arrived).

Nowadays DV is becoming the standard for consumer camcorders - being a
digital format, you get very good quality results, at full PAL resolution. And with a firewire output on the camera, capturing video is dead simple - just load up your DV software and hit 'capture', and your video will be saved to your PC for editing with your favourite video appication. I've been using Cinelerra and have been absolutely amazed at its capabilities. All of the video I've shot is now being edited down into decent videos, eventually to be burned on DVD. I'll mention more about Cinelerra here as I get the hang of it more.

This weekend will be in Copenhagen - with some luck I hope to have some more good video and get my editing skills practiced more! Having had one month to get the hang of my videoing technique, here's hopeing that Copenhagen lets me get some decent results!

Posted by Ben at March 24, 2005 02:27 PM

Comments

is it still working ?
i hate jvc, it falls appart soon ;)

Posted by: Name and email address are required. at March 21, 2006 02:43 PM